I just finished attending the jQuery Conference - Boston. I am blown away. Attendance was about 450, and it got rave reviews from everyone else I talked to. jQuery IS the future of web applications.
jQuery's attraction is the simplicity of it's implementation, it's ability to eliminate browser compatibility issues, and elegant API, 3000+ plugins, a strong user and developer community and it's penetration to almost 40% of the top 1000 web sites on the internet. The chief architect conducts regular conference calls with the dev teams at all the major browser projects, including a weekly with Microsoft. They ask HIM how to do implementations, so that their browsers will work better and faster with jQuery.
Here's the back story. I have a number of web apps I've developed over the years, including some non-Zikula ones. For one of them, we needed a component of it to be very slick, easy to use, intuitive. I originally wrote in in old school PHP back in 2002. I didn't have time to redo it myself so we had a very talented college intern do the work last fall. He chose to base it on jQuery, and we were very happy with the results, it consolidated 3 pages into one and used some slick drag and drop with some complex workflow rules. We deployed it last Spring and it worked out great, but right away I realized that I now had a new app to maintain that I didn't understand. I am not that great at javascript, so I decided to attend a conference with a pre-training day to get up to speed.
Implementation really is simple. The vast majority of the functions are of the form "Select something, then do something". For example, adding an autocomplete feature to an input field would look like this:
Code
$("#myclass").autocomplete(url);
where "#myclass" is a style class assigned to the input and "URL" is a query string that supplies JSON data for the dropdown. Of course there are other options for controlling the autocomplete if you like, such as precise data control and callback functions, but the gist is very simple, and uniform across all plugins.
Much time at the conference was spent on different approaches to writing single page applications in javascript using tools like javascriptMVC, function and unit testing, and also a new "sister" version of jQuery for mobile that will eventually be rolled into the jQuery UI core. Powerful stuff. I've always been a javascript skeptic, but not anymore. I am still doubtful that an app can be 100% html/css/js, but many at the conference were not (I suspect they are more designers than programmers).
For my part, I still haven't written a line of code using jQuery, but will start soon. I have some projects coming up that are ideal for scaling up my use of it. At the very least I will begin using UI components on my old school PHP pages, and I might convert a few more o my old components to small single page applications. I have charge of a few Zikula modules now, and intend to use it to solve some user interface and performance problems as soon as I can get a chance.
I can well imagine the next-next version of Zikula having a php/mysql infrastructure and a jQuery user interface on it. Not that it would need a ton of revisions to the 1.3/2.0 version to work, but it would probably take a while for the modules to adopt and implement jQuery in a broad way.
